When you want to expand your programming beyond learn-to-swim and water safety basics, adding swim teams and other water sports can be a smart way to expand on what you already offer. And while this expansion is not without its challenges, making the right choices in the rollout and implementation of these programs can reward your facility by increasing revenue, optimizing pool usage, and helping you better serve your community.
Consider Opportunities for Partnership
When starting a new team, many resources exist to help, from other programs in your area to national organizations such as USA Swimming, USA Diving, USA Water Polo, and the American Swimming Coaches Association.
Joel Schoenfeld, managing director of sport development at USA Swimming, emphasizes that his organization isn’t just for programs that train future Olympians. The organization has a new club success program and offers community impact grants to help launch and support programs in underserved communities. He also noted that a competition-ready pool is not a requirement for building an effective swim team program.
“We have some summer programs that operate out of outdoor pools and only use our seasonal membership,” Schoenfeld said. “But we also have a number of clubs that operate out of pools that are great for training, developing athletes, and teaching that may not be used for competition. They may not have things like starting blocks and timing systems, and that’s OK.” Even a 25-yard pool kept at fairly warm temperatures with no starting blocks can be fine for a beginning swim team. “We have a number of those programs across the country that operate an introductory program that enables those 12-and-under athletes who may not be competitive yet to get involved,” Schoenfeld said.
One approach that can help some sites achieve a successful program quickly can be to partner with an existing multi-site program in the area on the programming of your pool’s swim team. “They’ve got the resources, they’ve got the know-how, they’ve got the coaching staff, they’re already invested in the community, and so they’re just expanding their footprint into a new facility,” Schoenfeld said. Schoenfeld recommends using the Find a Club feature on the USA Swimming website. Clubs that have Gold, Silver and Bronze Medal status are likely to be particularly well-established.
Even some larger facilities sometimes opt out of running their own competitive team programs. This has been the approach taken by Greensboro Aquatic Center, in Greensboro, N.C., which has been a mecca for area swim, water polo, and diving teams to practice since its opening in 2011. “Some of our area teams have been around for 60 years,” said David J. Hoover, director of Greensboro Aquatic Center. “We didn’t want to say, we’re going to form the Greensboro Aquatic Center swim team and take all of your members. They’re already fighting each other for members, so we didn’t want to be a part of that.”
When using this approach, it’s important to price rental fees appropriately to meet both facility and community needs. Greensboro Aquatic Center accomplishes this by using one pricing and rental structure for teams under contract while charging double the normal rate to visiting and other external teams. “We also create ‘gaps’ in the schedule for normal programming (swim lessons) and public/community lane space before renting to teams,” Hoover said.
As swim teams have remained popular, rentals to area water polo teams have grown. “That sport’s been growing the last 15 to 20 years, and we have the water space, the water depth, and the equipment for them to rent to use,” Hoover said. “That’s definitely been a growth product
for us.”
While water polo typically benefits from water depths of more than 7 feet, special lane lines, and cages, it’s possible for less-equipped pools to offer programming with much less. USA Water Polo’s Splashball offering can be one way to get kids ages 5 and older introduced to the sport. The noncontact version of water polo teaches kids basic skills while letting them touch the pool bottom or use flotation devices if the water is deeper, and focusing on fun.
That said, highly equipped facilities sometimes see significant income when they offer amenities unique to their region. The Greensboro Aquatic Center, for example, serves diving teams such as North Carolina State in Raleigh and University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill that are willing to regularly travel significant distances because they don’t have their own onsite diving platforms. The center also hosts more than 70 events a year ranging from small-scale Y swimming meets to televised national championships. The demand for pool space at the facility has been so great that Greensboro Aquatic Center even expanded in 2019, adding a new 19-lane facility.
Cater to the Casually Competitive, Not Just Top Athletes
Nitro Swimming in the Austin, Texas, area runs swim lessons and team programs from three swim centers it built that feature 50 meter by 25 yard pools. According to head coach Mike Koleber, who co-founded and operates the programs with his wife Tracy, this approach gives Nitro the flexibility, control, and space it needs to offer more programs that meet market demands.
As one example, he noted that the traditional approach of offering a competitive swim team featuring a standard model of five training days a week doesn’t meet the needs of most families today. “If you ask the parents, ‘How many times a week do you see yourself wanting to be here,’ 19 out of 20 times they say once a week,” Koleber said. “So we flipped the model on its head.”
By offering intro swim teams that practice once or twice a week in addition to more advanced and rigorous programs, Nitro successfully meets the needs of far more swimmers, while also generating significant additional revenue. And while the cost per hour for parents is slightly higher with the intro teams than what they’d pay for a more intensive program per month, the overall costs are lower. Parents don’t get mad about paying for five nights a week if their kids only make it to two. And the kids get to learn and compete with other kids who are also participating at a casually competitive, fun, more recreational level.
“If you walk into an average third-grade class around anywhere USA, and say, ‘Who here loves to swim?’ almost every hand will go up,” Koleber said. “But if you then say, ‘keep your hand up if you want to swim for six days a week for the next 15 years of your life, including Christmas and holidays and summers and no more vacations,’ maybe there’ll be one kid.”
Koleber noted that offering one- and two-day-a-week teams can allow even a six-lane facility to offer multiple program offerings and bring in significantly more revenue by reserving two lanes for kids in these more introductory groups. “Put six kids per lane and do a Monday/Wednesday group, a Tuesday/Thursday group, a Friday-only group and a Saturday-only group and you, in effect, could potentially increase the size of your team by six or seven times just by doing that,” Koleber said.
But Koleber noted that choosing the right coaches is essential for making this approach work. “The prototypical swim coach doesn’t have the patience or the desire to work with a group of kids that are coming in once a week,” Koleber said. “Because these are the kids wearing the trunks going down to the knee, the $3 goggles, and they’re just not necessarily truly competitive swimmers. But if you staff it with a coach who loves to teach, truly loves kids, can connect, and wants to make that time enjoyable for those kids, they’ll want to come back, and they’ll tell their friends.” For these roles, Koleber seeks out coaches who are storytellers, animated hand-talkers, and enthusiastic encouragers.
Nitro also offers separate meets for these intro programs that just seek to introduce kids to competing in front of people. No one gets disqualified, everyone gets a ribbon if they get their best time, and the meets conclude in an hour and a half. This makes them more appealing for parents who are used to one-hour soccer or basketball games, not swim meets lasting four hours or more.
In addition to making programming more like other sports in this manner, Koleber also recommends structuring swim-team pricing with the same principle in mind. “It seems like people have taken a vow of poverty because they’re in aquatics,” Koleber said. “But I guarantee you, gymnastics is charging more. Piano lessons are more, even babysitting is more per hour.” And keeping prices too low for the market can mean not having the money to keep long-term, full-time employees with benefits that can facilitate the program’s long-term success.
Many of these programming approaches could be applied successfully to other markets. But Nitro’s approach of building new facilities is less common. It also may be harder to pull off in areas where investor or municipal support may be more limited, especially places that have not been doubling in population every 20 to 25 years the way the Austin area has.
Serve the Underserved
For that reason, it’s important to look at the local market and what’s really needed. That’s how Matt Finnigan got started with his current program Race Swami. He was coaching at a Catholic high school in Salt Lake City, and a few of his athletes approached him wanting to get better. Finnigan knew the answer was for them to advance beyond the seasonal team to one that trains year-round, so he suggested some top options in the area.
“They came back a couple weeks later and said, ‘we can’t join.’ And it was because it was too expensive. They went to three different teams, and all were way over their family’s budget,” Finnigan said. That experience led Finnigan to think about and then eventually launch Race Swami, a team that serves the West Side of Salt Lake City, which Finnigan said is both the most ethnically diverse area in the state and home to some of the most economically disadvantaged families.
He started with nine kids and $10,000 he and his wife had put in. “We were burning through that, and there was no way we were going to stick around,” Finnigan said. “So I started raising money and just started looking at foundations using every connection I had and more. Thankfully, we got one foundation toward the end of that first year when we were probably down to our last $25 and they gave us $20,000 to pay for the pool rental, which is just a huge hurdle to get by.”
Finnigan noted that getting support from one foundation can help with introductions with other foundations. “And 15 years later, it’s an everyday job. That’s my day job,” he said—one that has led to him stepping away from the pool deck himself to focus on fundraising. “It’s become an enormous responsibility to ensure that we can pay our coaches, allow kids to swim for little to no money depending on their situation, and stick to the mission.”
Today, Race Swami serves more than 200 kids a year—150 in a free spring and summer lessons program, and another 60 in a year-round competition team. More than 80% of those kids are on free lunch, pay $5 or $10 a month and get a reduced-rate membership through USA Swimming, which offers a community impact grant that covers things like gear so the kids don’t have to worry about it.
In November 2024, Race Swami launched a second similar program in Menlo Park, California’s Belle Haven neighborhood.
“I just try to keep the whole mission simple, and that’s to provide opportunities for disadvantaged kids and get them into a sport like swimming because it’s going to save lives, it’s a lifelong skill, and it’s fun. When you have the right coaches and the right mindset, it’s not an intense thing. And kids can kind of learn life’s lessons through swimming.”
In launching the new Menlo Park program, Race Swami started with two training days a week, then three days a week, and has since increased to four, with that fourth day focusing on techniques like turns or a stroke or dives. “So it’s just starting out with not being so ambitious,” Finnigan noted, arguing that this approach is different from one that would be appropriate for a program for experienced swimmers who may have previously been on other teams. “In an outreach program like ours, we’re starting from scratch working with kids brand new to the sport, and they’re just growing into it,” Finnigan said.
Race Swami’s approach also includes ACT prep courses for older kids and writing workshops for kids having trouble with writing with a larger mission in mind. “It’s more than just swimming—we want these kids to have choices and opportunities once they graduate from high school, whether it’s a four-year college, a two-year junior college, or a trade school.” Finnigan said. “And it’s working, because 100% of our kids have graduated from East and West High Schools in Salt Lake that otherwise see maybe a 70% graduation rate.”
According to Finnigan, success with a program like this requires recognizing problems that may not be obstacles for teams in more affluent environments. That could mean establishing programs to help kids improve bad grades. And it could include solving transportation issues, from starting a carpool tree to help kids get to a pool that’s a 10-minute drive away for practice, or helping kids get to a meet in Park City when it’s snowing out and their parents have vehicles with bald tires.
“It’s finding one little thing after another and just trying to rectify the problem,” Finnigan said. “So my advice to anybody who’s wanting to do something to make a difference in their community with underserved kids is just have the ability to see problems, ask questions, and then rectify it. And if you’re not willing to do that and you just want a swim team, then you probably just want to go to a more affluent area. And the chances are that those affluent areas are already being taken care of.”
Use Swimming Lessons as a Feeder Program
Veterans of successful team rollouts across different environments agree that swim lessons can be a great feeder program to help facilities build out and expand a competitive swim program over time. “Our swim team growth now is coming directly from our swim lessons,” Finnigan said. Race Swami now has a growing pre-competition team as a no-pressure option for kids coming out of lessons who aren’t quite ready for the competition team. Koleber likewise sees kids from lessons graduate into intro teams, and kids from the one- and two-day swim teams at Nitro move up to more advanced teams if they show the potential and the interest.
This is also a successful approach for Greensboro Aquatic Center. The facility’s lessons focus on the 7-to-9 age range. “Kids at that age can retain the information, and it’s a good age to facilitate drowning prevention,” Hoover said. “It can also be an age at which kids can consider swim teams.” Hoover said the facility will take note of kids who are A-plus performers and let their parents know. “We’ll say, ‘Mrs. Smith, your daughter or son would be great for this swim team.’ We try to graduate them and push them up to our local clubs,” Hoover said.
Over time, a growing range of options can help the programs grow and ultimately serve more team members and demographics. “We have very few clubs that serve 12-and-unders only, or that only serve 13-and-overs once they’re established,” Schoenfeld said of USA Swimming teams. “The bulk of our clubs will serve kids from 6 years old to college kids who are coming home and swimming with them in the summers.”
Schoenfeld noted that masters swimming can be another element that can boost revenues and contribute to facility and programmatic success. “Masters programming looks a little bit different in terms of the number of coaches you need and the ratio you need, and that allows you to fund some of your pool time and also fund some of your coaching staff to help provide them more full-time employment,” Schoenfeld said. Masters swimming and other offerings can add early morning, lunch hour, or late-evening programs to complement the core afternoon to early evening time slots occupied by kids’ teams and the daytime slots occupied by younger kids and homeschoolers.
Focus on Community
Schoenfeld recommends starting any swim team program by figuring out what the community needs. This can help inform your program pricing, offerings, and even whether you can sustain a for-profit model or a nonprofit one reliant on grant funding as the Race Swami program is.
One thing that successful programs with different models have in common is that they’re tailored to what their community needs and try to make the experience a fun, positive growth experience for all participants.
Schoenfeld noted that many YMCAs and other facilities use USA Swimming programs as a way to attract more families, but that they also serve a larger purpose. “From a public health standpoint, our clubs are often the only way that kids have access to year-round competitive swimming programs that help develop those lifelong healthy habits in a sport you can continue forever for significant health benefits,” Schoenfeld said.
Whether it’s learning healthy habits or the skills and determination to excel in school and life, swim teams can be a great developmental opportunity for many kids—including ones who will never be the next Michael Phelps. That’s why Koleber and others try to create an encouraging environment focused on helping kids of all abilities and experience levels get better every day. This blueprint is also a winning one for growing a swim team program. “If we want to grow the sport of swimming, we’ve got to start delivering a product that actually tastes pretty good for these families,” Koleber said. RM